Justice & Law Quote by Melissa Bean

There is a particular kind of outrage that reads as common sense, and Melissa Bean leans into it: taxes are mandatory, so attaching a privacy “price” to compliance feels like a shakedown. The sentence is built to make coercion the villain. “Taxpayers” cues an identity that’s broader than “citizens” and more sympathetic than “filers”; it’s the category politicians invoke when they want an immediate moral claim on government behavior. Then comes “should not,” a tidy piece of ethical grammar that signals this isn’t a policy tweak, it’s a line you don’t cross.

The subtext is about power asymmetry. The state already holds the leverage: pay, or face penalties. Bean is arguing that when government has that much leverage, consent becomes a fiction. “Just to file their taxes” is doing a lot of work, framing privacy surrender as an unnecessary add-on rather than a legitimate administrative need. That “just” implies mission creep: today it’s extra personal data for identification; tomorrow it’s broader surveillance bundled into routine bureaucracy.

Contextually, this tracks with debates that flared in the post-9/11 era around data collection, identity verification, and the steady thickening of the paperwork state. It also anticipates a more modern anxiety: that agencies (and their contractors) will treat sensitive information as a resource to be mined, shared, breached, or repurposed. Bean’s intent isn’t anti-tax; it’s to redraw the boundary between civic obligation and personal autonomy, warning that convenience and compliance are often the cover story for expanded institutional reach.